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This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.

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It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will.

I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.

Part of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer.

And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.

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